guyrowlanduk-1 Reviews

Psychobitch (2019)

Sweet and sour

[7/10 · 21 May 2022]

Teens-with-mental-health-issues movies seem to be everywhere now, and for an uncomfortably good reason - the world is full of teens with mental health issues. This Norwegian film from 2019 throws the school prefect (Jonas Tidemann) together with the eponymous psychobitch (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) and the results go pretty much as you'd expect.

Filtering the story through progressive Norweigen culture is a strong plus. Everyone's well-meaning attempts to help tend to make things worse, and that is astute. Performances and direction are strong, and the snow-kissed town looks fabulous.

The script by writer/director Martin Lund is perhaps the weak link. Secondary characters come and go at critical moments and always feel too peripheral. Most of all, Tidemann's character Marius is portrayed as fundamentally weak. That gets in the way of the resolution everyone wants and deserves - you sort of root for the would-be-couple, but as Marius becomes increasingly hopeless he really does everything to affirm Frida's nihilism. Because the issues dealt with are so serious, the change we want to see in Marius needs to be profound, and it didn't feel like it was.

But for all of its flaws, you do feel the film's heart is in the right place and it is an engaging watch.

Adventureland (2009)

The Cameron Crowe movie that Cameron Crowe never made

[10/10 · 4 May 2018]

Simply wonderful. Adventureland is a gem that completely passed me by on release, but am beyond euphoric to have discovered via the gift of Netflix.

Yes, the spirit of Cameron Crowe is all over this, even down to the Paul Westerberg songs. And of course I mean Cameron Crowe at his fearless, heartfelt best, that mainlining of music and young love in Say Anything, Singles or Almost Famous, anchored and rooted in a particular place. And what a place Adventureland is, where Falco blaring 20 times a day tortures the downtrodden staff, all marking time listlessly waiting for something more interesting to happen to their lives. And of course something interesting happens to them as they wait.

Every cast member earns their place without a foot wrong really, but of course special praise has to go to Eisenberg and Stewart. And especially especially Stewart, 100% believable as damaged but never playing the victim, beguiling while never being cute. All of which would have counted for little had Motolla's script not been so sharp, never over-emoting, flirting with and enjoying genre cliches here and there but never at the expense of succumbing to the inevitable. Oh, and the end credit song was the most perfect choice in a film full of them.

This is a film to treasure. Looking at the rest of Motolla's resume, this is likely to be his career highlight, the personal film he protected from all sides. A true cult classic.

Griff the Invisible (2010)

A joy of a film

[10/10 · 19 September 2014]

6.1/10 at time of writing? This monstrous injustice cannot be allowed to stand.

This is indeed an absolute joy of a film. I can see why the Kick Ass comparisons, but this is a vastly superior film. In fact, along with The Incredibles, I'd put it as only the 2nd good superhero film post 2000. First time writer / director Ford pitches the tone just right, slyly playing his hand with good humour and a good heart. The cast in general do well, but our two leads stand out. Maeve Dermody in particular is instantly engaging and totally sells a potentially tricky part. How international success has eluded her is something of a mystery.

As with all good films, it's best to know as little about the plot as possible. Suffice it to say its a film for anyone who ever felt they didn't really fit in.

This has cult-classic written all over it. Hope all involved all get the recognition they deserve, however belatedly.

Jules and Jim (1962)

What's up with the sound?

[3/10 · 31 July 2007]

Watched this in dizzy anticipation, and was thus not anticipating the wooden acting and dull script, but the showy direction was perhaps more predictable. I was totally baffled by the sound, however - what was going on here? Clearly the whole film was post-sync'd, with no location coverage at all. But it was terribly dubbed, with lipsync way out, very loud artificial foley work, many effects missing altogether and many more totally inappropriate. The legendary fall and swim in the Seine sounded like splashing in a bath; applause at a theatre sounded like 3 people clapping. The net effect was like listening to a bad radio play with vaguely illustrative pictures slapped on top.

Was this horrible sound design intentional for some new-waveish reason? Or was it a victim of primitive technology... and if so, why did Truffaut not want to use location sound like everyone else?

The History Boys (2006)

An abomination against mankind

[1/10 · 30 October 2006]

Words fail me, and yet I feel I must try.

Imagine a truly terrible stage play. The dialogue is so atrociously off the believability scale, you find that your own internal organs are climbing up round the outside of your brain in an attempt to penetrate your inner ear to stop PLEASE GOD STOP this abomination. The story is tedious to the point where watching paint dry as an alternative could give you heart failure from sensory overload. The acting... well, with characters written like this, they could only be plausibly played by creatures of an entirely different species.

Now picture it, not as some dim shadowy figures performing in 3D on a stage 100 foot away, which might make the theatricality slightly less grating, but on a HUGE movie screen. The pantomime timing, the huge close-ups of unspeakably unspeakable lines. The direction never letting you forget for one single second that this is a PLAY darlings. Every fake note reverberating round the auditorium like a death knell, making you intensely aware of your own mortality and the fact that you are scandalously wasting precious hours of the one life you have. There are people you love, and maybe you have never told them - not really. You could have spent the evening telling them, but no - instead you are here, in a cinematic prison of abject misery.

Because there is a lot of literature and poetry discussed, The History Boys has a veneer of intellectual sophistication. However its script and direction is so monstrous in every regard (and a criminal waste of some fine acting talent) that your life would be far more greatly enriched by reading the Stockholm phone directory. Backwards. Twice. That it took the combined efforts of BBC Films, The UK Film Council (lottery funded) and Fox Searchlight to bankroll this is an utterly damning indictment of the British Film Industry.

Everyone involved should be placed in detention. For all history. Twice.

Crash (I) (2004)

Disappointingly flawed

[5/10 · 24 April 2006]

Goodness knows it's ground that is well trodden - Short Cuts and Magnolia to name but two meandering LA multi-character tales - but it's not far off a remake of Lawrence Kasdan's racially themed Grand Canyon (yes, there's even a movie producer character). So it needs a lot to stand out, but a ludicrously contrived plot and ludicrously contrived characters put paid to that. Least convincing are two black friends who talk in loud passionate political debate (one militant, one reasoned), before pulling out guns on white passers-by. What, in God's name, is THAT all about? Playing more like theatre than reality, Crash fails to convince even at its primary level of preaching about racial tension. The second half improves and there are a couple of powerful scenes before it all stops. But the best film of 2005? Pur-lease.

Serenity (2005)

Strictly for sci-fi nerds

[5/10 · 17 October 2005]

Abysmal characterisation, atrocious dialogue and awful acting. Funnily enough, like an episode of a sci-fi nerd's TV series, only louder.

Just at the point where, bored witless and losing the will to live, I was about to walk out, the film actually found a good idea or two. The last 50 minutes were to my amazement quite good fun (though shamelessly ripping off Aliens more than once). But it didn't make up for the rest.

Go into your local bookshop, and you'll find hundreds of books on the shelves that could turn into movies like this. Die-hard sci-fi fans will be delighted at this idea, but others may well conclude that painful exposition batted around by soap opera characters do not make a great movie. Some have said this is the sort of film the final three Star Wars should have been - in reality they compliment each other rather well as they've all lost any sense of coherent narrative or believable performances.

If this is the pinnacle of sci-fi cinema in the 21st century, God help us all.